The first order of the day was to try and find somewhere for breakfast, we are staying in a Travel Lodge and they don’t have a restaurant or pub connected. In the end we picked a cafe called The Dock which is in a small marina near the ferry port, breakfast was lovely, they are obviously used to catering for sailers that have just come back from a cross channel trip as the portions were massive and we had a great table looking over the harbour and watching the comings and goings. After being fully fed and watered we set off to collect the car and head to Buckland Abbey. This hasn’t actually been an abbey for quite some time but it was originally home to Cistercian monks who were famous for making Cider. During the reign of Henry the VIII it was taken over by Sir Richard Grenville who pulled down some of the Abbey and turned it into a house, I have to say it is far better than some of the church conversions we have seen on TV and I wouldn’t mind living there at all! It was also owned by Sir Frances Drake who left it to his youngest brother when he died. There is currently an exhibition by Andrew Logan a modern artist around the abbey and although I am not a big fan of modern art some of the pieces were interesting if not necessarily things we would want at home. We walked all round the house and gardens and then planned to set off for another house but on the way we saw a sign for Morwellham Quay which we visited in the 1980’s so we decided to go and have a look at what has been done with the place since then. Since we last visited UNESCO have designated the Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape as a World Heritage Site and Morwellham has been designated a Key Centre. It was once a strategic port being on the River Tamar 32km from Plymouth and was connected to Tavistock via the canal that was built in 1817 and the Devon Great Consols (once the richest copper mine in the world) by rail in 1959. Unfortunately we couldn’t go into the mine as all seats on the train were booked but we walked round the village which was used by BBC for filming the programme Edwardian Farm. We had a really nice ice cream from the village shop but didn’t try the locally brewed beer mostly because it wasn’t being offered! We decided that it probably isn’t as good as we remembered it, mostly because last time we were here there seemed to be a lot of people walking round in period costume and all the ‘trades’ were just working and talking to each other whereas now they seem to have a schedule and limited numbers of people that can watch at any one time, possibly due to lack of space but it is a bit of a shame as it doesn’t feel quite as real. On the plus side, we did stand and talk to the blacksmith for a while who was making himself a hot chisel which apparently is used to cut and shape steel pieces. By the time we had finished walking round it was about 3.30 so we decided to take the scenic route back to the hotel which actually meant that we crossed into Cornwall, it wasn’t particularly different but the scenery in this part of the world is very scenic so we had a lovely drive back. It was then time to have a relax in the room before heading off to the fireworks later.
